When the Germans and Rockets, Came to Town

By SHAILA
DEWAN, Published: December 31, 2007, New York Times

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — In 1950, this cotton market
town in northern Alabama lost a bid for a military aviation
project that would have revived its mothballed arsenal. The consolation prize
was dubious: 118 German rocket scientists who had surrendered to the Americans
during World War II, led by a man — a crackpot, evidently — who claimed
humans could visit the moon.

Konrad
Dannenberg, 95, is one of the original German scientists who helped turn Huntsville into Rocket City.

Huntsville was better known for cotton.

Ultimatelythose German immigrants made history, launching the first American satellite,
Explorer I, into orbit in January 1958 and putting astronauts on the moon in
1969. The crackpot, Wernher von Braun, was celebrated as a visionary.

Far less
attention, though, has been given to the space program’s permanent
transformation of Huntsville, now a city of 170,000 with one of
the country’s highest concentrations of scientists and engineers. The area is
full of high-tech giants like Siemens, LG and Boeing, and a new biotech center.

Rocket
scientists, propulsion experts and military contractors have given the area per
capita income levels above the national average and well above the rest of the
state.

Huntsville, Alabama can be. But they acknowledge that
the state’s backwater reputation is a hindrance to recruiting. Local boosters
are hoping to use the 50th anniversary of Explorer I on Jan. 31 as a
way to promote Huntsville as Rocket City, unveiling a new pavilion, housing
a 363-foot Saturn V rocket, at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, a museum and popular tourist
attraction.

Even the
Germans, who had spent five years cloistered on an Army base near El Paso, Texas knew beforehand of Alabama’s spotty “résumé,” as
Konrad Dannenberg, who at 95 is one of the last surviving members of the
original von Braun team, put it last week. “We knew that
the people here run around without shoes,” Dr. Dannenberg said in a tone of
deadpan gravity. “They make their money moonshining and that’s what they
drink for breakfast, and supper. And so we, in a way, were a little bit
disappointed that it was really not that bad.”

The residents
were wary of the Germans as well. They knew that most of them had been members
of the Nazi Party and that they had built the V-2 rocket for Hitler. But the
charismatic von Braun accepted virtually every speaking invitation, winning over
Rotarians and peanut farmers.

And the Germans
tried hard to assimilate. Von Braun insisted that the scientists speak English
if there was so much as a single American, even a janitor, within earshot, said
Ernst Stuhlinger, 94, another surviving member of the team. Dr. Stuhlinger was
one of many who settled on Monte Sano, the mountain overlooking the town, which
reminded the Germans of home.

“People said,
‘If you had just been at war with these people, how can you be so accepting of
them?’ ” recalled Loretta Spencer, the 70-year-old mayor of Huntsville, offering a visitor a homemade
pecan cookie. “But I think we were just in awe.”

In school, the
German children’s diligence posed a challenge. “I remember working real hard
in physics class to beat Axel Roth, who later worked for NASA,” Ms. Spencer
said. “I beat him by a point on the final exam, and I was really tickled by
it.”

The Germans
also needed thousands of Americans to staff the missile program. Many who
answered the call were “rocket boys” like Homer H. Hickam Jr., author of the
memoir by that name, who scavenged together his first rockets in a West Virginia mining town and now lives here.
Others were young men from cotton-picking families who went to school on the G.I.
Bill.

By the time
Explorer I was launched, the residents of Huntsville had so thoroughly adopted the
Germans that there was an impromptu celebration. Charles E. Wilson, the former
secretary of defense whose severe curtailment of the Germans’ work was blamed
by some as having allowed the Soviet Union to beat America to space with Sputnik, was burned
in effigy.

And by the
mid-1960s, von Braun had so mastered the local culture that when he wanted
voters to approve a bond issue for the Space and Rocket Center, he persuaded
Bear Bryant, the revered University of Alabama football coach, and Shug Jordan,
the rival Auburn coach, to make a television commercial supporting the project.

Rocketry
permeated Huntsville, where windows shook and dishes
cracked each time the powerful propulsion engines were tested. Children built
rockets powered by zinc powder and sulfur, and the mad-scientist-in-the-basement
tradition still has a hold. Tim Pickens, a rocket designer who helped a private
manned spacecraft win the $10 million X Prize in 2004, attached a
200-pound-thrust engine to a bicycle in his garage here.

City officials
trying to capitalize on this kind of ingenuity are irritated that prominent
scholars have chosen this moment to scrutinize the von Braun team’s Nazi ties.

A new biography
by Michael J. Neufeld portrays von Braun as a man who made a Faustian bargain.
Diane McWhorter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Birmingham native, is at work on a book on the
space race that compares Nazi ideology to contemporaneous white supremacy in the
South.

Most
Huntsvillians concluded long ago that the Germans had been coerced into joining
the party. And, though skeptical of claims that the scientists were thoroughly
apolitical, Ms. McWhorter says Southerners might easily understand that
membership in an organization is not necessarily the best indicator of
sentiment.

“There were
members of the White Citizens Council in the South who were probably less racist
than people who weren’t members,” she said.

Residents point
to the symphony and the Huntsville branch of the University of Alabama, both nurtured into being by the
Germans, and say their enlightened views contributed to the fact that the town
had the first integrated elementary school in the state. Dr. Von Braun himself
was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan for hiring blacks, said Bob Ward, a Huntsville newsman and von Braun biographer.

Besides, Huntsville is a forward-looking place. The
Nazi question “just doesn’t come up,” said Loren Traylor, a Chamber of
Commerce vice president.“That was
then, this is now.”